Obie winner Frederick Weller (of the USA Network drama In Plain Sight) is a strong if initially tongue-tied Orlando. Let’s face it, the lovesick wrestler can seem a little wimpy: no match for Rosalind. But Weller’s Orlando bursts with emotional defiance, whether it’s directed at his older brother, Duke Frederick, or the woodland courtiers he imagines too savage to share. And I liked his ambivalence in the awkward scenes with Rosalind as Ganymede, whom he can’t decide whether to laugh at or grab.

Of course, more goes on in the forest than this one warped courtship. And Maler fills the rustication with song and dance, the racing background music pungently pierced by Tom Gleadow’s near-operatic renditions of the folk songs from which Duke Senior hanger-on Jaques sucks melancholy “as a weasel sucks eggs.” Fred Sullivan Jr.’s Jaques is pretty operatic himself, investing the depressive lord with a melancholia that’s downright flamboyant. And Larry Coen is a more natty than nasty Touchstone, the “motley fool” gone AWOL from court to delight Jaques in the forest. Gradually shedding his yellow pinstriped suit to go native among the “country copulatives,” Coen’s Touchstone is a bright presence, whether debating Jim Wrynn’s laid-back old Corin or trying to feel up Becky Webber’s fiddle-playing Audrey (who decks him).

Some broad-comic sadomasochism is provided by Jennie Israel’s Phebe, the plain-Jane shepherdess who falls for Ganymede, and Paul Melendy’s Silvius, the long-suffering swain who sees nirvana in Phebe’s “inky brows” and “bugle eyeballs.” Although he gets stripped, pummeled, and ridden like a horse on his way to bliss, Melendy’s gangly, yelping Silvius captures the pain of love better than anything else in the production.

Maler has a way with the grand finale, and As You Like It’s is heralded by Hymen’s parading down the center aisle like a large dragonfly, then binding the play’s quartet of couples with bright orange ribbons before a full-out folk dance that precedes the epilogue. So, on a balmy night on Boston Common, all may be as you like it — if not, for those who think this comedy’s journey is to a deeper place, as you love it.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman’s taste runs less to Shakespeare than to South Pacific. At least it does in Peter Parnell’s 2001 play about the colorful scientist known for his work on quantum electrodynamics, QED. And it does take the edge off the trepidation of an audience member whose one crash course in physics has been Copenhagen to enter the new Central Square Theater, where QED continues through August 3, and hear not Einstein on the Beach but Rodgers & Hammerstein.

The Catalyst Collaborative @ MIT production of QED opens the spanking-new 200-seat black box shared by Nora Theatre Company and Catalyst partner Underground Railway Theater, playing in rep with jazz virtuoso Stan Strickland’s Coming Up for Air: An AutoJAZZography. Both shows are directed by Jon Lipsky, and they’re more compatible bedfellows than you might think, since QED presents its scientist as a sort of artist clown. And that conception of the eccentric, eclectic Feynman didn’t start with QED; fellow physicist Freeman Dyson once described Feynman as “half genius, half buffoon.”

Royal fun As You Like It accomplishes what every production of a Shakespeare comedy tries to do.

Free fisticuffs After last year’s Hamlet , Commonwealth Shakespeare Company artistic director Steven Maler decided he wanted a play “with life and character and vitality to it — an upbeat type of spirit” for this year’s offering of free Shakespeare on Boston Common.

Dream team The fairies are creeping on their bellies along the carpet of the Wang Theatre rehearsal-hall floor.

Let’s get physical Shakespeare’s super-dainty Kates become cannoli in The Taming of the Shrew on Boston Common.

Twin peaks The bay of Ephesus laps Collins Avenue in Commonwealth Shakespeare Company's Latin-tinged, frisky if over-frenetic The Comedy of Errors (at the Parkman Bandstand on Boston Common through August 16). It is not across sands of subtlety but through a spray of salsa that the perpetrators of this 1930s-South-Beach-set riff on Shakespeare's early comedy pratfall.

Senior years These are the BU Evergreeners — chatty and well-dressed, brandishing ballpoints and Starbucks.

Brave new world Regardless of what’s in her name, biographies of Ms. Hathaway are scarcer than hens’ teeth, and no wonder: we know even less about her than we do about her husband.

Et tu Brute? "The whole theatrical event is sort of . . . a much more mysterious one."

It’s a man’s world It’s hardly Shakespeare’s most frequently produced work, but in the Bard’s early career, Titus Andronicus was one of his most popular plays.

Moonbeams Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a dizzy dance of a drama, meandering mystifyingly between May Eve and Midsummer Eve under a moon that goes from new to full swifter than arrow from the Tartar’s bow.

ARTSEMERSON'S METAMORPHOSIS | February 28, 2013 Gisli Örn Garðarsson’s Gregor Samsa is the best-looking bug you will ever see — more likely to give you goosebumps than make your skin crawl.

CLEARING THE AIR WITH STRONG LUNGS AT NEW REP | February 27, 2013 Lungs may not take your breath away, but it's an intelligent juggernaut of a comedy about sex, trust, and just how many people ought to be allowed to blow carbon into Earth's moribund atmosphere.